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Sunday, 6 April 2014

Canada: Days 21, 22 & 23

Yesterday we had to leave the cabin for good and travel to Victoria so that we could catch the ferry across to Seattle tomorrow. It was a 4 hour journey and we stopped to look at a lake or two on the way. Out of the three cars we hired when we arrived only two have sat nav.

Yep, you've guessed it! Ours was the one without!

This led to a few interesting occasions where we were completely lost. As we were making our way to the hotel in Victoria, a red light split us from the rest of the convoy. I can't lie: we had a hectic 20 minutes trying to find our way!

The hotel was really nice, there were tons of cherry trees blossoming everywhere (or as we like to call them: wedding trees!). We made plans to meet in the lobby early the next morning to see Butchant gardens.

The next morning didn't go quite to plan: some people seemed confused as to what time had been specified and as a result the lobby was surprisingly empty when we reached it.

Fortunately Starbucks was next door!

Finally we arrived at the gardens, they were beautiful! My favourite was the Japanese gardens, but the sunken garden was pretty spectacular too! :-)

We were still strolling around the gardens when we found out that we had the wrong time for the ferry and we were in danger of being late!!! So off we scurried and made it on time!

My uncle Graham had made a group booking with the ferry company and we had priority boarding because my uncle's in a wheelchair. We were sitting in the crowded waiting room and the lady was announcing over the speaker system the order of boarding. After all the announcements she said : but first would the Chant party come forward to board first.

So off we trotted! As we were passing everyone a little boy turned to his mother and asked in a hopeful tone: are we part of the Chant party, mommy?

The next day we picked up the RV, it was huge!!! Despite being out of the hotel by 9.30 am, somehow we didn't actually start the first leg of our journey until 3:00 pm! The first bit was all of 350 miles! Which meant that we accomplished the first stretch of our route 101 trip in darkness!

Very, very typical of us Chants!!!

We arrived at our first stop at 10:30 pm, crawled into our beds tiredly and fell asleep. All except my Dad who had steadily drunk coffee for most of the day, so he didn't sleep at all..DeeDee